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Category: Science/mathematics

The mysterious case of the coronavirus lab-leak theory

The mysterious case of the coronavirus lab-leak theory

Carolyn Kormann writes: Since the coronavirus first appeared, at the end of 2019, four and a half million people have died, countless more have suffered, whole economies have been upended, schools have been shuttered. Why? Did the virus jump from an animal to its first human host, its patient zero? Or, as some suspect, was the catastrophe the result of a laboratory accident in Wuhan, a city of eleven million people in central China? Kristian Andersen, an infectious-disease expert at…

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Simple mathematical law predicts movement in cities around the world

Simple mathematical law predicts movement in cities around the world

Scientific American reports: The people who happen to be in a city center at any given moment may seem like a random collection of individuals. But new research featuring a simple mathematical law shows that urban travel patterns worldwide are, in fact, remarkably predictable regardless of location—an insight that could enhance models of disease spread and help to optimize city planning. Studying anonymized cell-phone data, researchers discovered what is known as an inverse square relation between the number of people…

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An ‘historic event’: First malaria vaccine approved by WHO

An ‘historic event’: First malaria vaccine approved by WHO

The New York Times reports: The world has gained a new weapon in the war on malaria, among the oldest known and deadliest of infectious diseases: the first vaccine shown to help prevent the disease. By one estimate, it will save tens of thousands of children each year. Malaria kills about half a million people each year, nearly all of them in sub-Saharan Africa — including 260,000 children under 5. The new vaccine, made by GlaxoSmithKline, rouses a child’s immune…

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Sunlight affects whether languages have a word for ‘blue’

Sunlight affects whether languages have a word for ‘blue’

Cathleen O’Grady writes: Color is a spectrum: Red fades from orange to yellow, whereas green merges to turquoise, then blue. Languages treat this spectrum in different ways: Some have separate words for “green” and “blue,” others lump the two together. Some barely bother with color terms at all. “The question is, why?” says Dan Dediu, an evolutionary linguist at Lumière University Lyon 2. Now, he and his colleagues have found evidence for an unexpected answer: People with more exposure to…

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Can nuclear fusion put the brakes on climate change?

Can nuclear fusion put the brakes on climate change?

Rivka Galchen writes: Let’s say that you’ve devoted your entire adult life to developing a carbon-free way to power a household for a year on the fuel of a single glass of water, and that you’ve had moments, even years, when you were pretty sure you would succeed. Let’s say also that you’re not crazy. This is a reasonable description of many of the physicists working in the field of nuclear fusion. In order to reach this goal, they had…

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Charles Sanders Peirce was America’s greatest thinker

Charles Sanders Peirce was America’s greatest thinker

Daniel Everett writes: The roll of scientists born in the 19th century is as impressive as any century in history. Names such as Albert Einstein, Nikola Tesla, George Washington Carver, Alfred North Whitehead, Louis Agassiz, Benjamin Peirce, Leo Szilard, Edwin Hubble, Katharine Blodgett, Thomas Edison, Gerty Cori, Maria Mitchell, Annie Jump Cannon and Norbert Wiener created a legacy of knowledge and scientific method that fuels our modern lives. Which of these, though, was ‘the best’? Remarkably, in the brilliant light…

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The lab-leak debate just got even messier

The lab-leak debate just got even messier

Daniel Engber and Adam Federman write: As the pandemic drags on into a bleak and indeterminate future, so does the question of its origins. The consensus view from 2020, that SARS-CoV-2 emerged naturally, through a jump from bats to humans (maybe with another animal between), persists unchanged. But suspicions that the outbreak started from a laboratory accident remain, shall we say, endemic. For months now, a steady drip of revelations has sustained an atmosphere of profound unease. The latest piece…

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Covid vaccine immunity is waning — but how much does that matter?

Covid vaccine immunity is waning — but how much does that matter?

Nature reports: Six months ago, Miles Davenport and his colleagues made a bold prediction. On the basis of published results from vaccine trials and other data sources, they estimated that people immunized against COVID-19 would lose approximately half of their defensive antibodies every 108 days or so. As a result, vaccines that initially offered, say, 90% protection against mild cases of disease might only be 70% effective after 6 or 7 months. “It felt a little bit out on a…

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Serious infections linked to autism, study finds

Serious infections linked to autism, study finds

The Scientist reports: While researchers have found plenty of gene variants that seem to increase the risk of an autism diagnosis, it’s not clear why some people carrying these mutations develop autism spectrum disorders and some do not. In a study published today (September 17) in Science Advances, researchers point to a potential answer: severe infections during early childhood. After an early immune challenge, male mice with a mutated copy of the tuberous sclerosis complex 2 (Tsc2) gene developed deficits…

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A massive subterranean ‘tree’ is moving magma to Earth’s surface

A massive subterranean ‘tree’ is moving magma to Earth’s surface

Robin George Andrews writes: Réunion, a French island in the western Indian Ocean, is like a marshmallow hovering above the business end of a blowtorch. It sits above one of Earth’s mantle plumes — a tower of superheated rock that ascends from the deep mantle and flambés the bases of tectonic plates, the jigsaw pieces that make up the ever-changing face of the world. The plume’s effects are hard to miss: One of the island’s two massive volcanoes, the aptly…

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Pfizer’s Covid vaccine could be authorized for children aged 5-11 but may pose risk for boys

Pfizer’s Covid vaccine could be authorized for children aged 5-11 but may pose risk for boys

The Guardian reports: Healthy boys may be more likely to be admitted to hospital with a rare side-effect of the Pfizer/BioNTech Covid vaccine that causes inflammation of the heart than with Covid itself, US researchers claim. Their analysis of medical data suggests that boys aged 12 to 15, with no underlying medical conditions, are four to six times more likely to be diagnosed with vaccine-related myocarditis than ending up in hospital with Covid over a four-month period. Most children who…

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A new way to think about clean air

A new way to think about clean air

Sarah Zhang writes: When London vanquished cholera in the 19th century, it took not a vaccine, or a drug, but a sewage system. The city’s drinking water was intermingling with human waste, spreading bacteria in one deadly outbreak after another. A new comprehensive network of sewers separated the two. London never experienced a major cholera outbreak after 1866. All that was needed was 318 million bricks, 23 million cubic feet of concrete, and a major reengineering of the urban landscape….

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How racism warps science

How racism warps science

Alice B. Popejoy writes: Of the ten clinical genetics labs in the United States that share the most data with the research community, seven include ‘Caucasian’ as a multiple-choice category for patients’ racial or ethnic identity, despite the term having no scientific basis. Nearly 5,000 biomedical papers since 2010 have used ‘Caucasian’ to describe European populations. This suggests that too many scientists apply the term, either unbothered by or unaware of its roots in racist taxonomies used to justify slavery…

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Another study promoting ivermectin has suspect data

Another study promoting ivermectin has suspect data

BuzzFeed News reports: For anti-vaccine activists, the clinical trial results couldn’t have been better. The drug ivermectin, scientists in Argentina announced last year, prevented 100% of COVID-19 infections. That glowing finding helped spark a craze for the decades-old medication, which is normally used to delouse people and deworm livestock, and drive the perception that it is a silver bullet against the pandemic. “If you take it, you will not get sick,” an ivermectin-boosting physician told a Senate committee in December,…

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Medical science is failing millions of Covid long-haulers

Medical science is failing millions of Covid long-haulers

Ed Yong writes: While watching the scientific community grapple with long COVID, I have thought a lot about a scene in The Lord of the Rings. Faced with impending doom, the hobbits Merry and Pippin ask the powerful treelike ents for help. But despite the urgency of the situation, the ents are slow. They meet for hours, and after a lot of deliberation, they announce that they’ve agreed that the hobbits are not orcs. The hobbits, who already knew that,…

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